Quaker Lane + Congress Square | Downtown

lexicon506 said:
The striped spandrels completely kill this thing and are a total 180 from the "jewel box" renderings. They make it look like the building took off from Rt. 128 and landed in downtown Boston.
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Have to agree, it's unfortunate, but love the boldness of this project. Cities should constantly surprise us and challenge the conventional. This does that quite nicely.
 
Judging with only a few panels. Wait til more of the facade is built before jumping to conclusions.
 
I would be interested in hearing from some of the professionals on the board whether it would have been practical to detail the steel and make the spandrels transparent.
 
tysmith95 said:
Judging with only a few panels. Wait til more of the facade is built before jumping to conclusions.
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Yes. And it's important to remember that once the interiors are finished, the contrast between the spandrels and the windows won't be nearly as pronounced.
 
They should have just went balls to the wall like the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg addition. I realize it's a different style of building that they were built on top of, but you have to admire the way they just went for it.

c_iwan_baan_18.jpg
 
It's not done yet, give it some time. Though, they're definitely going to be covering up the undersides right? Leaving the decking exposed like that would be criminal.
 
cburns said:
You have to wonder that being so jarring, that maybe this would have been more successful if the addition was of significant height.
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Here's what I see - if you take the height as a given, then you face a problem as follows:

You need to have some kind of set back in order to preserve the detail of the original cornice, but if you just go vertical from that setback then you end up with unattractive massing that would look like an overextended rectangular chapstick.

So the solution is to do some fancy cantilevers to maintain the overall massing while highlighting / respecting the cornice.
 
Does anyone know how they made this work structurally? Is it essentially a facedectomy? It can't be easy to place 7 new stories on top of a century old building.
 
^ Yeah read the earlier parts of the thread - or just look at the photos. It's a facadectomy. Not just building on top of century old building - connecting several century old buildings together while building on top.
 
theSil said:
Does anyone know how they made this work structurally? Is it essentially a facedectomy? It can't be easy to place 7 new stories on top of a century old building.
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Done all the time. Old buildings have lots of "extra" gravity load available as they were seriously over designed because the engineering was done with lots more rules of thumb.

The kicker (bad structural joke) is the lateral loads (wind, and or seismic). Older buildings usually need to be reinforced for those load but often this is not a major pain.

Vertical expansions are much more common than you might think. Tufts Dental was one that was well documented here on AB quite well.

cca
 
cca, are you waiting for this to be completed until you weigh in with an opinion?
 
statler said:
cca, are you waiting for this to be completed until you weigh in with an opinion?
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Nope ... I think its going to be a bold contemporary gesture that we often say on this board that Boston does not do. I am feeling positive on this one. I think when it is done we are going to feel pretty proud of it.

cca
 
I hope it ages better than some of the older fusion examples around Boston.
 
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